Mischka's War

by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)

  When he did write, she was upset by the absence of anything personal—‘there is all sorts of stuff in the letter about Stauvers … a sailing boat, the weather and the subway but nothing about himself, his work or Helga’—and decided to tear up the cheque for $30 he had sent. Helga’s pregnancy with their first child was noted with an aphorism in Olga’s diary (‘Helga was Misha’s wife. Now Misha is Helga’s husband’), and Johanna’s arrival in 1954 created a new bond, the subject of correspondence with Helga, and a reason for visits between Florida and Washington after Misha and Helga moved there in the spring of 1954. Occasionally, Olga tried to re-establish closer emotional contact with Misha‘—Please, Mishutka, don’t be so distant—’but judging by the correspondence between them, the old, easy, intimate relationship was never recaptured.

  Olga never went back to Europe. She didn’t have the money, and Helga says she didn’t have the desire either: there was nothing for her to go back for. But Europe returned to her, in a way, in the last year of her life, when Soviet controls were relaxed and communication was resumed with her sons Jan and Arpad. The first contact was a telegram from Arpad on 15 September 1955, which, Olga recorded, changed everything: she no longer always felt tired; ‘the foundation mood is no longer sad’. Long letters followed from both Arpad and Jan, the former unmarried, the latter with three children and about to embark upon his third marriage. There was even a letter from Olga’s niece Ariadna, returned to Riga after long years of exile in the Soviet Union to find her father gone and her mother dead. The photograph Ariadna enclosed showed her as beautiful as ever, but a different character from before— almost ethereal, all the spunk knocked out of her. She had spinal problems that made it difficult for her to look after her children and died not long after her return, aged barely forty.

  Olga could exchange letters with and send parcels to her relatives in Riga. But the Soviet Union hadn’t opened up to the extent that they could visit Olga in America or vice versa, even if they could have afforded it. Olga’s idea that each of them would have an acre of land in Florida to fall back on had always been impractical and turned out to be a mirage. Tadasu inherited the plot and continued to live there, according to Helga’s memory, and that was more or less the last they heard of it. So the family that war had divided remained divided—perhaps even more so, from Olga’s point of view, than it had been in the years in Germany, when at least she had had Mischka.

  As for Misha’s American life, I could just say, ‘Reader, I married him’, like Charlotte Bronte, but a lot of water flowed under the bridge before our first midair meeting in 1989. His marriage to Helga lasted twenty years, produced two children (Johanna, born in New York in 1954, and Tamara, born in Washington in 1956) and ended against Helga’s will. In 1969, Misha married Victoria Nieroda, an American of Polish origin who became a writer and painter. That marriage, which also lasted twenty years, produced a son, named Arpad like the uncle and grandfather he never knew. Olga was gone when Vicky came on the scene, but she would surely have approved of the fact that Vicky believed in Misha’s genius, as Olga had said his wives must do.

  Throughout all three marriages, Misha worked at the National Bureau of Standards (later the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and lived in Washington DC in the area of MacArthur Boulevard, his first house there having been acquired from the physicist Hans Suess, whom he had got to know back in Heidelberg. Misha was a reverse commuter, living in DC and driving out to Gaithersburg every day in his big old American Cadillac, of which he was very proud, pronouncing the word ‘Cadillac’ as if it were French. His loyalty to the bureau, as he called it, was unshakeable and, to my mind, excessive, at least in the downsizing years I observed, but the great advantage of staying there was that he had a place to do his ‘gadgeteering’—that is, develop inventions using his photonuclear expertise—with some congenial old colleagues, as well as continue his theoretical work. I thought he would have been much better off moving earlier in his career to a good research university, with graduate students and postdocs. But he pointed out that he would then have had to apply for grants to support his research, and would have been no good at it. Perhaps he was right.

  We were married for the last ten years of his life, with him still at the bureau and based in Washington and me working at the University of Chicago, where I was a professor of history. In that period, he learnt a lot about Soviet history (much more than I managed to learn about nuclear physics, hard though I tried), improved his childhood Russian (more successfully than I improved my German) and spent more time than before in the Soviet Union, which satisfied an old prophesy of his by collapsing back into Russia in 1991.

  Commuting works if you don’t have small children, animals or house plants and money is not too tight. Some weeks, Misha would drive his old Cadillac from Washington to Chicago, which took him ten or eleven hours; on one winter day, the automatic window-closing seized up at the first tollgate, leaving him to drive almost the whole way home with the driver’s window open, but he didn’t mind. He was never bored by the drive because he thought about physics problems and listened to music. Other weeks, I would commute by plane, and he would pick me up on a Thursday evening at what was then National Airport, just ten minutes from our house. We would go home to our little cottage near the canal, pour a glass of wine, put on some music and make dinner together (Misha was the main cook, recently self-taught and working it out from first principles of chemistry). These are very happy memories, even though the music I thought of as my homecoming theme—Schubert’s ‘Rosamunde’ quartet—is sad. The sadness was for happiness coming so late.

  We spent a lot of time in Europe. Unlike Helga, Misha hadn’t fully left Europe behind him. He and Helga spoke German at home, and their children grew up bilingual. More strikingly, in terms of self-identification, he spoke German, not English, to the son of his second marriage, even though Vicky didn’t know the language. His spoken English had an accent and a few idiosyncrasies—the extra syllable in ‘surrepetitious’ was a favourite of mine, and his version of ‘very good’ dropped the ‘y’ to rhyme with the German sehr gut. A flock of ducks on the Georgetown Reservoir was ‘kiloducks’ (ducks to the power of three), and he greeted stray dogs on the canal towpath with a gentle ‘Nun, Hund’.

  Misha was back in Heidelberg on a Humboldt Fellowship in 1959 and visited regularly thereafter. Much of the work in photonuclear physics for which he was best known was done in collaboration with a Frankfurt-based German physicist, Walter Greiner. But Misha apparently never contemplated moving back to Europe and dissuaded Jensen from putting him up for a job in Heidelberg in the 1960s on grounds of his feeling of ‘pressure’ in Germany. I could see the effects of that pressure for myself when we spent extended periods together in Frankfurt, Tübingen and Berlin in the 1990s. He seemed like a native in Germany, knew everything and liked to show it to me, and yet there was an inner resistance to the place. I was happier there than he was.

  At some point in the past, Misha had evidently seriously tried to become American. That meant, in the first instance, feeling gratitude to, and admiration for, the United States for taking him in. Later, he moved to a more critical position, joining the anti-war movement (in the days of the Vietnam War) and the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that was criticism from within and, moreover, criticism that he felt was itself a demonstration of the strength of American democracy. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Misha understood his US citizenship (acquired in the mid 1950s) as something that carried an obligation of active political engagement; in this sense he was very different from Mischka back in Germany. He even wrote letters to the President.

  By the time I met him, however, that phase was over. I thought of him as alienated from America (though perhaps, as I was alienated myself, there was some degree of projection, as well as influence). He still felt an obligation of citizenship, but now the emphasis was on international citizenship, including but not limited to membership in the international community of physics. Al
though he never spelled this out, that sense of international citizenship seemed to carry a strong identification with Europe. Not Latvia, not Germany, but a broader civilised Europe that was personified by Paris. When I met Misha, he owned a studio apartment on Rue de la Folie-Méricourt in the XI arrondissement, and was spending three months a year there working with his collaborator, Vincent Gillet, of the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. Misha was passionately attached to Paris, knew the city and its restaurants and concert halls inside out, and was so committed to improving his French (one of the European languages he didn’t know from childhood) that he even read Georges Simenon’s crime stories, a genre that he otherwise shunned. There were no bad memories in Paris. It was the Europe Misha could live with, as well as the one he couldn’t live without.

  I know a lot more about Misha as a result of writing this book. But I also feel I understand more about the particular historical moment he found himself in, the gathering and then dispersal of displaced persons in Europe after the Second World War. That’s interesting because I work on that historical moment as an academic historian too. Once I even published an article about DPs in a scholarly journal, using Misha, Olga and his friend Bičevskis as case studies, though I’m not sure that I should have done. The journal’s referee commented that the picture you get from this kind of material is completely different from what you get from archives. I noticed that myself, in my two capacities as personal biographer and impersonal historian. Most archives are institutional, and that gives them a bureaucratic and rule-oriented perspective favouring the general and the typical rather than the individual and idiosyncratic. But individuals are not statistical averages. Once you have real individual people in your sights, you constantly notice anomalies, divergences from the expected norms.

  The question for a historian is whether this is good or bad. In Stalin’s time, Soviet historians were suspicious of life stories unless they were exemplary, and dubious about biography because, in focussing on the quirks of individual lives, it obscured broader truths about collective experience. I take the second point, if not the first. But at the same time, ‘collective experience’ is a generalisation constructed, consciously or not, on a sense of the average; no single actual person ever lived it. Granted that individual experience is a construct, too, in that we have access to it only because somebody told the story, it’s one step closer to real (unedited) life.

  If I had just read the archives, I would know that young Latvian men of Misha’s generation were in danger of being called up into the Waffen-SS during the German occupation, but it would not have occurred to me that one way of beating this would be to go to Germany as an exchange student. I would expect that Mischka and Olga, being DPs, would live in DP camps in Germany (the bureaucracies, hence the archives, knew in principle that some DPs were ‘free-livers’, but since those DPs were unavailable for direct observation, that’s about all they knew). From the archives, I would not be aware of the DP grapevine that in some mysterious way brought occasional information into and out of Riga, and I would know next to nothing about the possibility and process of DPs ‘going on to the German economy’, including why anyone with a good berth as a ward of UNRRA would consider doing so.

  Most of these aspects of the Danoses’ experience were not typical of DPs as a whole. But apart from the question of what was typical, there’s the question of what was possible (that is, conceivable) within the parameters of DP experience. In that scholarly article I wrote about them, I showed how much agency the Danoses had as DPs (‘agency’ being the academic shorthand for ability to influence what happened to them) and drew the broader conclusion that DPs in Europe at the end of the Second World War had more agency than they are given credit for and were not just passive victims at the mercy of strange armies and governments. But of course Mischka, Olga and Bičevskis were on the fortunate end of the DP spectrum. They were educated, with transportable skills; they knew German; they even had German acquaintances to leave the odd suitcase with. Their wartime experience was not bad, in comparative terms. They were not prisoners of war, or forced labourers, or concentration camp inmates, or Jews (Mischka may have been half Jewish, but was not perceived as such by others or himself). They survived, and had each other as support in the last stages of the war and the years after.

  In terms of comparative refugee experiences, DPs in Europe after the Second World War were relatively fortunate. Life in the European DP camps of the 1940s was strikingly better than what awaits Syrian refugees in Turkey or Afghans and Iraqis trapped in Nauru today. Thanks to the policy of the Allied military governments and the protection of UNRRA, DPs lived better than the surrounding German population and were not subject to violence. Some of them even had the chance of a first-rate free education in German universities. The DPs’ situation was also vastly better than that of the Palestinians whose refugee camps in Jordan are now more than half a century old, with no solution in sight. The IRO resettled all but a small fraction of them outside Europe, in quite tolerable conditions, within six years of the end of the war; and the DPs’ individual preferences, as well as the host countries’ selection, played a role in where they ended up. Australia, with its requirement of two years’ assigned manual work for DP immigrants, was one of the harsher resettlement environments. Yet Mischka’s friend Bičevskis not only had a job as an engineer within a few years of arrival but had also bought a plot of land in the Sydney suburbs and was building a house for his family.

  Even in the best of circumstances, however, uprooting and displacement are no picnic, and wartime displacement with the attendant exposure to violence and death is particularly traumatic. It would be a rare DP without the equivalent of Misha’s nightmarish wartime moments (seeing the Jewish graves in Riga, the Dresden bombing, near-death from diphtheria in Flensburg). Virtually all DPs had lost or left behind family members, as was the case with the Danoses. Moreover, survival brings survivor’s guilt. Olga was stricken with guilt when her ex-husband died, still in Riga and thus on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and she would privately reproach herself until the end of her life for having failed to get two of her sons out in 1944. Misha still found it painful to talk about the fate of his father and his brother Arpad half a century later. All DPs would have carried similar psychic burdens into their new lives.

  But this is a book about the singularity of Mischka and Olga’s stories, not their representativeness. The idea of singularity was very important to Misha; he hated to be put in any category, including the category of DP (that’s why I am not sure that I should have written that scholarly article). He didn’t like to see his life in the 1940s as formed by war, flight and displacement. These were simply contingent circumstances in the ‘real’ story of his life, which was how he left Riga on his journey to become a theoretical physicist, honed his skills in Heidelberg and ended up achieving his goal in America.

  At the same time, Misha saw himself as a witness to historic events and took this role seriously: as his big musings on the Soviet occupation of Riga, VEF, the Jewish graves outside Riga, the Dresden bombing, the Heidelberg Tea Colloquium and other topics demonstrate. He was a first-class witness because of his ability to remember exactly and stick to what he saw with his own eyes, and these musings are remarkable historical documents. The Dresden bombing description, for example, is probably unique among eyewitness accounts that survive. Most survivors were in one place during the bombing, usually hiding in basements from which they could only guess what was happening above. Mischka was outside, going on foot for a night and a day through many parts of the city, including the shattered centre, with bombs falling around him.

  I learnt a lot about Mischka through writing this book, and in the process understood more about Misha too. In fact, I often thought about it as a collaborative process—we now understood more about him—as if I were taking up where his autobiographical musings left off. Learning more about Mischka didn’t change my basic view of Misha, but it added something. That man I met on th
e aeroplane in 1989 was remarkably free of context from my point of view, almost as if a Martian had landed in the seat next to me. He acquired context, of course, as I got to know him, but something of that feeling remained. He was the man who had miraculously turned up from nowhere and saved my life. Since he had done that, I took it for granted that he was the stronger of the two of us. He didn’t agree, but I attributed that to partiality. It was only in retrospect that the picture in my mind started to change, with me, the rescued one in my scenario, looking stronger than I had thought at the time, and he, the rescuer, more vulnerable. Mischka’s vulnerabilities helped me see Misha’s. And Olga’s protective responses made me recognise something similar in myself that I had earlier discounted.

  Writing this book brought some bad moments. Some of them involved pain on Misha’s behalf, when he was in danger, as in the Dresden bombing. Some of them were when I found Mischka not quite up to the Misha standard—for example, in the stiffness and occasional pomposity of his youthful letter-writing style. His letters, I felt, didn’t adequately convey the humour, liveliness and simple niceness of the man I knew (who was recognisable as, though distinct from, the man Helga fell in love with). I was reminded of how, at his wake in Washington in 1999, a woman from the old National Bureau of Standards crowd who remembered Misha and Helga as the centre of a lively social circle in the 1960s burst out almost angrily after a series of solemn tributes, including mine: ‘But Mike was fun! Why don’t you say what fun he was?’ I did try to show that in this book, but the Mischka-of-the-record sometimes got in my way. Show yourself as you really are, I would mentally admonish him; make the readers like you. I wanted it to be as it was when I introduced Misha to my friends and students in the 1990s and they all immediately loved him.